Sense but no sensibility

DO we live in an increasingly violent world? Could it be that the violence isn’t increasing, only the ways and means we find out about it? ARE YOU AUTISTIC? (C4) presented us with a new version of this conundrum. Diagnoses of autism, we were told, are at an all-time high.

So are there more people with autism than ever before? Have we become better at spotting it? Maybe we’re over-spotting it, diagnosing autism where it needn’t be? This somewhat sketchy documentary had a big reveal up its sleeve, the results of a huge study, involving 750,000 British adults.

Completing a questionnaire devised by Cambridge University’s autism expert, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, some 87,000 people scored over the threshold for autism or just over one in ten.

It was right that they revealed the statistic at the end of the show because a greater part of it had been devoted to showing us how “ordinary” the condition can be.

Bored by chit-chat? Prefer taking apart an old clock to attending a cocktail party? Get annoyed when your routines change? We recognise these traits because they’re in ourselves and people around us.

Much of what we might call typical male behaviour, such as loving facts and lists and not being able to read peoples’ emotions, comes under the umbrella of autistic traits. It’s as if, for reasons not fully understood (or explored here), some have a concentrated version of the traits everyone has.

It was clear, though, before the survey results were unveiled, that many of them still get on with their lives. The presenters, trainee lawyer Georgia Harper and artist Sam Aherne were good examples.

Some 47,000 of the survey’s 87,000 “hidden” autists were women in fact, and while this was intriguing, the documentary didn’t have much else to add. More frustratingly, it spent a lot of time with Professor Baron-Cohen who has himself, previously suggested the condition might be an exaggerated kind of maleness.

So why not ask him what he thinks now? It was also suggested (again, minus detail) that perhaps female autism is better equipped at disguising itself. An experiment, of sorts, got some blokes speed-dating with a roomful of young women.

The conversation flowed, the eye contact zinged and at the end, not one man realised he’d been speaking to an autistic woman.

So if autistic women can learn social behaviour or use it better than autistic men, then how and why? More importantly, what use are surveys without some insight?

What use is regeneration, either, without homes? SOCIAL HOUSING, SOCIAL CLEANSING (Channel 5) included a clip of Tony Blair promising no more ‘no-hope areas’. In saying this, he bolstered a strong myth about social housing. To those who moved into the first high-rises, council housing was an achievement, something to be proud of. Somewhere along the line it became something people escaped from. Blair, and politicians before and after, overlooked the hope in ‘no-hope’ estates, ignored a sense of community and ignored the real causes of the problems.

Bulldozing them, a second round of ‘slum clearance’, seems the only solution today’s leaders have in mind, with one difference. Post-war clearances moved low-income citizens to bright, clean, modern homes. Last night’s film showed them being replaced by ‘luxury’ developments they couldn’t afford.